Sinda Gregory: Isuspect some readers have a difficult time placing your
work within a tradition, fiction or poetry or journalism or prose poetry or whatever. What
do you consider your work to be?

Ron Silliman: I consider what I write to be prose poems but not fiction, partly for
formal reasons and partly because I'm not interested in "making things up." And
although most readers aren't familiar with it, there is a tradition of the prose poem,
extending back 160 years to the work of Aloysius Bertrand, which is seldom incorporated
into the teaching of creative writing in the academy. Creative prose is subsumed under the
term fiction, with the result that works that don't fit the category are ignored.
But subsuming prose under the term fiction islike subsuming all of what can
occur in a text under the rubric of character, or narrative. For example,
the work of Baudelaire in prose is extraordinarily interesting. He was the first person
capable of using prose as a closed, stanzaic form. Traditional modes of defining literary
categories don't account for the way in which even expository prose is marked by the
devices of literature. I often use Theodor Adomo's Minima Moralia to demonstrate
how his essays, which may be only six or seven sentences long, use sentence length and
prosody as elements clearly integral to his argumentation. Wittgenstein is another writer
whose prose can be viewed from the same perspective. It's not an accident that a person
who is an interesting stylist, like Derrida, can have a far greater impact than perhaps
the weight of his ideas would suggest he should have, while equally useful thinkers who
are not such compelling writers may be perceived as less importantJurgen Habermas
would be an example. By organizing our academic institutions around fiction rather than
around prose, by subsuming all forms of prose into fiction instead of the other way
around, a great deal of confusion has set in. At Berkeley, linguistics and rhetoric are
departments apart from literaturecompartmental aphasia.

SG: Can prose poems have as much popular appeal as the novel? Or is this a relevant
issue for you?

RS: It's definitely a relevant concern, but this question is often posed
incorrectly. Literature needs audiences, but not a "public." A homogeneous
audience (or mass market) is one that effaces the individual characteristics of the
reader, to arrive at a reader-as-cipher, much as television begets its viewer. There are many
legitimate audiences, but not a single "super-market" that one should try to
occupy This diversity is recent, the result of the expansion both of literacy and of
technology. Up until perhaps 1950, the increase in the number of possible readers meant
larger audiences only for an essentially centralized small body of white, male,
patriarchal writing. Women, people of color, lesbians and gay men were excluded or
marginalized. The Jewishness of the Objectivists, for example, kept their work from being
recognized as important for thirty years. As the elaboration of offset printing during the
'50s gave rise to the small press revolution, poetry in America was cleaved in half by a
debate between the so-called academics, writers who valued the preservation of convention,
particularly the closed forms that originated in Europe, and the so-called New Americans,
who countered with a speech-based poetics and a nationalism of open form. If you read much
of the literature of the '50s and '60s you get the feeling that a great contest was being
waged, and that one side or another would somehow eventually win. Presumably the losing
side was simply going to wither and disappear. Not only has that not happened, but the
amoebalike cleaving process has continued, both within this original two-party framework
and outside it. Most notably, the rise of feminist culture has meant the rise of a women's
literature that does not need to rely on the legitimation of male-dominated institutions
for its sense of value.

SG: And each of these subcultures naturally produces a literary audience.

RS: Exactly. Each subgenre of poetry today reflects a different audience, a
different community. Disputes as to the "excellence" of one kind of writing or
another are in fact sub rosa arguments as to which social group will dominate the
other. What we need to understand is how a subgenre of poetryboth creates and is
created by that social construct we call an audience. A very useful example is the work of
Judy Grahn, which has done so much to make possible a kind of literature that was not even
conceived of in the academic versus New American poetry debatethat is, lesbian
writing. Works such as "The Psychoanalysis of Edward the Dyke" and "A Woman
Is Talking to Death" are as complex, subtle, and efficient as any literary
productions of the last thirty years. Yet, unlike my audience, the readers she seeks are
not going to identify with her texts as readers first, but as women, and often as
lesbian women. Such an audience maynot have a thorough sense of literary history
as an important characteristic; in fact, it may have a sense of literature as exclusive
and patriarchal. Thus it's necessary for Grahn's pieces to appear artless, an effect she
achieves through such devices as enjambment and variable capitalization. The only formal
technique she ever foregrounds is parallel construction, yet the linguistic play in the
texts seems limitless. Grahn's poetry is

experiencing some fashion because it's directly related to a conscious social movement,
and because many people, men as well as women, are just now coming to terms with what the
existence of a lesbian community really means in our lives. But does it make sense to ask
if it can have "popular appeal"? The important thing is that it does have value
for its community, extraordinary value. The writing that has been associated with such
magazines as This, Hills, Roof, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, Tottel's Poetics Journal, AHundred
Posters, QU, Tuumba Press, and The Figures Press, much of which has been in
prose forms, is no less a community.

Larry McCaffery: How does this writer/audience relationship affect your own
situation?

RS: The community that I'm a part of and interested in is an audience with very
distinct social characteristics: overeducated, underemployed people in major urban areas.
To some degree the New American poetries are the literature of major urban areas, whereas
academic poetry is much more the writing of the interior in this country, the college
towns, away from the coasts. As political scientists, such as Erik Ohn Wright or Nicos
Poulantzas, have noted, a major characteristic of these new classes arising in urban
environments has been an inability to acknowledge its own collective existence, to know
its own name. Thus even a political movement initiated by this group which has a clear
demographic base, such as tenant's rights, tends to be posed in issue-centered terms: rent
control. Likewise, many "neo-petit bourgeois" renters will vote against such
issues, because they do not identify with this collectivity. So it's not surprising that
more than one type of poetry is related to the middle strata, reflecting real differences
that exist within it. My own totally partisan sense of this is that just this critique of
the Subjectthe recognition of the "I" as a discontinuous and
overdetermined ideological construct, a social entity, and the investigation of the
individual that such a recognition makes necessaryis the most direct path of
that "absent name"

SG: Aren't you ever tempted, though, to create the kinds of works that would cut
across these audience barriers, allow you to appear on "The Johnny Carson Show"
and make a fortune?

RS: If I were interested in writing for the mass audience I would write for
television or the cinema. This whole issue is a very tricky area: there is a great desire
on the part of many writers to speak plainly to everybody. But "speaking
plainly" is just one code of stylistic density among many others. There is no such
thing as "natural language"; there are only learned languages. And there
is no such thing as naturalism in literature. It, too, is simply an affected style. At the
same time, there is no such thing as "simple individuals."

SG: Legend has it that you once stood on a streetcorner in San Francisco reading
Ketjak to passersby. But Ketjak is an awfully difficult, complex work, and I
suspect that most of your audience must have thought you were as crazy as most of the
other street readers I've seen in San Francisco. I also know that you've been very active,
both professionally and informally, in Bay Area community action. Don't you see a paradox
at work here between your aestheticsyour work as an "experimental"
poetand your political desire to reach out to and communicate with the working
class?

RS: My politics and my aesthetics are essentially different faces of the same
argument. When I was editing The Tenderloin Times Iwould not use articles
with the same textual characteristics as Ketjak or Tjanting, because they
would not reach the audience I was trying to address. My poetic forms are addressed to
very specific people who are more easily addressed in those forms. In terms of the
situation surrounding that streetcorner reading of Ketjak, the book is so
thoroughly involved with street language and found language, and that corner is where all
the street preachers come to harangue in San Francisco, that my reading was a way of
returning that language to its source. Part of the semiotics of that street corner is the
question of the sanity of a given person reading aloud from a booka question that is
ostensibly taken care of by putting that person into a coffee house in a neighborhood near
a college. I got some very interesting and positive responses from people passing by who
not only don't usually listen to literature but who, listening to me, had no idea they were
listening to literature. I'm glad I did it, even though I lost my voice and wound up
spitting blood on the last few pages since it took four and a half hours to read the whole
thing.

SG: Do you see your work and that of the other new prose poets as being an
effort to reinvent the novel, to put it out of its misery after all its death agonies?

RS: The work of Barrett Watten, Charles Bernstein, Lyn Hejinian, Bob Perehnan,
Carla Harryman, myself and others is not so much reinventing the novel as taking the
lessons of literature learned in the realm of poetry and, from these, developing a form
that won't so much replace fiction as be capable of occupying the space of the
novel, both in terms of size and in the concerns it can approach, explore, and represent.
The great advantage of the novel, especially in the nineteenth century and in the first
part of the twentieth, was that it was a genre without conventions. This put on the
individual all of the responsibility to develop the work in whatever way it was going to
be, whether Tristram Shandy or Moby-Dick. Total freedom means total
responsibility. But at a certain pointthe rise of genre fiction, or gothic fiction,
or whateverthe question of convention in the novel became an important
consideration. As the novel has become more and more related to the rise of publishing
companies within the framework of corporate capital (at least it used to be this
wayI think this is breaking down in our time), the conventionality of the novel has
made it a restrictive form, limiting in the same way as the sonnet. And that problematizes
it as a useful form. Of course, modernist novelists recognized this and have attempted to
solve the problem of conventionality and how to represent the real world. But this problem
is extraordinarily difficult, as everyone who has tackled it has repeatedly demonstrated.

SG: Doesn't this problem with conventionality arise in poetry as well?

RS: I'd say that what can be done now in terms of poetry is similarly
problematic. Donald Wesling likes to argue that, since the rise of modernism, poetry that
has undergone this revolution has adopted three forms: the dramatic monologue, the prose
poem, and free verse. These are not necessarily three distinct genres, nor are they
necessarily experienced in the same order in the same country. In these terms, you can
talk about Japanese poetry or American poetry or French poetry. The question is, having
done that, what is there left to do? Especially if, for example, it seems as if the whole
question of free verse has come to its logical conclusion in the range of work between
Olson and Creeley and Ed Dorn, on the one hand, and Ted Berrigan and Frank O'Hara on the
other. Personally, I'd also argue that the dramatic monologue reaches its apotheosis with
Browning and has not been useful since.

SG: Obviously, that leaves the prose poem as the one vehicle that has not been
fully exhausted, especially the long prose poem.

RS: Yes, at least within the framework Wesling proposes, which doesn't seem to
account for performance work, collaborations, sound texts, and concrete or visual poetry.
Historically, the prose poem, except for Lautreamont and a very few others, has been a
short form. But there is no inherent reason for this! The individual sections of
Bertrand's Gaspard de la Nuit may be brief, yet the volume as a whole is a single
work, almost a novel composed of verbal still lifes. Naming the form, Baudelaire exploited
it merely to urbanize the short lyric. The prose poem has not been exhausted by any
meansfar from itand has the potential to occupy the territory of the novel
without the limitations of the novel: its conventions of character, plot, and dialogue.
Virtually any undergraduate literature major in America can churn out passably mediocre
fiction because it is so anchored in these conventions. But to attempt a poem is to
confront language and reality, and the interventions each makes on the other. Often the
prose poem has been misused, not explored in terms of its own possible dynamics but simply
appropriated as a means of perpetuating a dying genre. In the hands of Robert Bly, prose
poems are dramatic monologues, nothing more.

LM: Length here seems to be an important prerequisite if the prose poets want to be
ambitious in the ways that novelists traditionally have been.

RS: Yes, it's almost the relationship of quantity: you can do something in 300
pages that you simply can't do in 30 lines. This question of scale is more than a matter
of "bigness"; in terms of what can go on in a work, the number of elements that
can be brought into play, the complexity of the relationships between elements, all these
things are infinitely more possible in the longer forms.

LM: Do you recall what prompted you to begin Ketjak? Your other early works
are clearly poems, even if not traditional in format, but Ketjak . . .

RS: Right, those early texts were pieces that other poets would have no difficulty
identifying as poetry. Ketjak and Tjanting have prompted people to come up
and say, "Why do you call these things poems?" But for me there was never a
sense of breaking away from poetry. Ketjak, which in many respects marks my
adulthood as a writer, was the next step in my work as a poet, not a step away The
concept for Ketjak had been in my mind for at least a year, but I didn't know how
to proceed with it. I was setting down in my notebooks various ideas that might be worked
out subsequently. One of these lines of thought was about structure in terms of ways that
I had extrapolated from listening to various types of music. "Ketjak" itself is
a musical formit's the Balinese version of the Ramayana myth, with as many as two
hundred singers. It's essentially a choral form, and I was interested in the concept of
cumulative effort. There was also the music of Steve Reich, who had just performed
Drumming in San Francisco at the Asian Art Museum. Reich's work is based on repetition.
Drumming utilizes large, austere, repetitious structures"phase
structures," he calls themthat are based on the repetition of simple elements.
These structures cause the work to have a mechanism of proceeding, going from beginning to
end. If you're not writing narratively or argumentatively, the whole question of beginning
and ending and how to proceed in a work are by no means trivial questions. Reich's work
was a model that proposed an approach to this issue that was different from any I was
familiar with.

LM: Could you explain how the structural basis of Reich's music relate to Ketjak?

RS: Reich separates the interior content of the work from an exterior form. His
whole approach is very different from a notion that all romantic poets have tended to
possess. From Wordsworth to Olson, they asserted that "form is never more than an
extension of content." While this idea liberated the poem from demonstrating a purely
convention-seeking and closed conception of structure (the high-bourgeois ideology that
Pope satirically exposed and yet remained trapped within) and made possible a speech-based
poetics that it has taken a century and a half to exhaust, it nevertheless subsumed one
axis of meaning (form) to another (content). This is not an accurate account of the
function of language within experience. Language intervenes and edits the real in our
daily lives. Reich's work, particularly the early tape pieces of the 1960s, exposes this
distortion by artificially (in the best sense of that word) separating the two dimensions.
In Come Out, Reich took the tape of a sentence spoken by a nineteen-year-old
charged with homicide during the 1964 Harlem riots from a description of this person's
beating at the precinct station, focusing on the words "come out to show them."
The syntax of the host sentence is quite interesting: "I had to, like, open the
bruise up and let some of the bruised blood come out to show them." But the
procedures to which Reich subjects the phrase have nothing to do with that structure. The
phrase is recorded in two channels and then played so that one gradually moves ahead of
the other, until eight "voices" are attained. The result has the texture of a
million birds beating their wings and, to my ear, is very similar to the effect of the
Balinese ketjak. Ketjak is structured so that every paragraph has twice as many
sentences as the previous paragraph, with every other sentence being a repetition of the
sentences (in exactly the same order) from the previous paragraph. One way to think of Ketjak
is to imagine putting one sentence on one square of a checkerboard, two on the next,
four on the next, and so forth. The fact that repetitions occur creates a sense of
cohesion and continuityyou are continually returned to a specific place, and you
begin to expect this. This repetition is generic rhyme, a system for setting up readerly
quantifications throughout the text. I also found that I could focus attention on the
sentences themselves, rather than only on larger structures. This was something that I did
not anticipate; it happened in the process of writing. But I had been looking for
something like this as early as 1968focusing attention on the present, rather
than on larger structures.

SG: By "larger structures" I assume you mean things like character and
plot in the traditional sense.

RS: Exactly. A work built around those structures ensures that the reader's
attention is always going to be defused by having to pay attention to what was going on
three pages earlier and having to wonder what will be occurring four pages from now. This
tends to decenter the consciousness and focus of the reader so that she is not
experiencing the "presentness" in the work. This diffusion violates my
experience of the world. Even though I am often thinking about a whole series of things
and people, those thoughts occur continuously in the present. There is no such
thing as a continuous past, such as the aorist tense of fiction, which is a
fictionthat tense is precisely what is fictive about fiction. The repetition factor
of Ketjak breaks up the context of those "old" sentences and also puts
the new sentences into contexts other than those in which they were originally conceived.
I was fairly careful not to have too many sentences that followed from those
immediately preceding. This was relatively simple, since very often as I was creating Ketjakwhich
took five monthsthere would be a month or two between the writing of one sentence
and the next. It is very difficult, though, to write continuously from that perspective,
so this whole process forced me to direct my attention inward, to focus on the sentence.
And it seemed to work.

LM: We've been discussing Ketjak's form, your attention to the sentences,
the attempt to keep the reader focused on the present. What about the so-called content of
the book? In some respects Ketjak seems a kind of interiorized novel, presenting a
portrait of fife and language in the mid-1970s. What were your intentions in this regard?
Or were you not much concerned with content?

RS: Ketjak is very content centered. It has been pointed out to me by
various other people that there is a great deal of "dailiness," a real taste for
the humble, in Ketjak. That sense was very important to me, and still is; it was
something I had not been able to approach using a speech-based metaphor for the text. I
was recently reading a Viktor Shklovsky essay on Vasilfi Rozanov called "Plotless
Literature" in which he talks about Rozanov's use of "plotlessness" in
Russia eighty years ago. Shklovsky says this approach was totally consistent with an
interest in what he calls "objects in the kitchen." I, too, have some sense of
the importance of objects in the kitchen. I don't want to subscribe to the theory of
epiphanies in literature here, but I do feel that what has taken on many of the most
important characteristics, emotionally, for people in our time are the objects for which
we have no names, or those for which we have no particular symbolic importance. A shoelace
would be an example of such an object; so would closets, and certain musical instruments.
The dobro was a very consciously chosen figure in Ketjak simply because I know of
no other writing that mentions it. The sentence in which the dobro appears has to do with
communal living on a houseboat on the bay in Marin County; this is a form of American life
not much acknowledged by the language of public institutions, which includes creative
writing. Presenting these "ignored" areas of experience was and is of definite
concern to me, and, in that sense Ketjak is extremely content oriented.

LM: Why is it that certain "contents" become ignored? Is it mainly a
matter of convention, or do certain objects have a reason for being talked about over and
over again?

RS: The question of what is appropriate content is mainly conventional. People tend
to have things in the world that they are taught to view as meaningful. All the rest, of
course, continue to exist in the world; they acquire meanings that often become the
repositories of emotional responses, responses that at first glance may seem irrational
but that are actually the consequence of societal input. We don't articulate our responses
to these objects because we have not been preconditioned to recognize their contents.
Exploring that territory seems to me to be far more important than producing another
campus novel or a book about another failed love affair.

LM: Do you intend, then, to use these "kitchen objects" as objective
correlatives, in Eliot's sense of objectifying inner emotional states?

RS: Not in the sense of objectifying inner emotional states. These items are
indexes of contemporary American life in ways that serve as indexes for such responses in
other people's lives.

SG: This raises an interesting issue: the nature and function of the articulating
voice in your fiction and its relationship to you as Ron Silliman. Would you say that you
appear in your works as a kind of character?

RS: No, I'd say that the voice in my works is the product of the language that
appears there. The subject in Ketjak and Tjanting and the three poems that
will eventually be published in The Age of Huts isa consequence of the
types of language that appear in each work. Peter Yates, a composer and music theorist,
argues that the "content" in music is actually a function of aesthetic
consistencythat in any given work there is a "statistical average" of all
the different things that are going on, which in contemporary music can be an awful lot.
Even someone as discontinuous as John Cage, for example, nevertheless creates an
identifiable tone in his works, a tone that is present even in a piece as decentered as
"Empty Words." That sense of consistency, that summing up of all the kinds of
layers that appear in each work, definitely has the sort of balance that I don't find far
from what I would recognize as my own "voice" But I'm not attempting to give
that voice a psychology in any traditional sense, an "address" in the sense of a
Zip code. This voice is constituted through a lot of exterior information. One way these
voices find their way into my work is through my use of found language. There are, for
instance, some significant chunks of Willard Van Orman Quine, a person whom I disagree
with almost entirely but whose mind I find fascinating. In Ketjak there's also a
lot of advertising and street slang, none of which is exactly "me." As every
advertising writer knows, whatever you have read you have thought. In that sense those
exterior voices do participate in creating that larger voice. "The words are my
life," says Louis Zukofsky, and to that extent my works are indeed autobiographical.

LM: What interests you, from a formal standpoint, in found language? Is this the
same impulse that made Braque and Picasso place objects from the world into their
collages?

RS: I don't think so. I've heard my work described by David Antin and others as
"collage technique," but I've always felt uncomfortable with that designation.
In the traditional work of the collage there has never been much interest in examining and
then returning the interest in those objects back into the world in which they occur. Usually
there's not a political or critical usage of these objects, whereas I am very much
concerned to bring out those aspects.

SG: Could you give an example of what you mean by the "political and
critical uses" of these found objectsthese objects being the words themselves,
I assume?

RS: Sure. A good example would be technical jargons. The law is a classical
example of a jargon, suggesting that all words can be purged of connotationsand it
illustrates the fallacy of this suggestion. The different interpretations of the Supreme
Court from one generation to the next, which are significantly based on different
political pressures at any given period of time, have a lot to do with the fact that in
1980, say, certain words have very different connotations than they did in 1954 or 1832.
The entire history of the so-called immutable laws of our nation is based on precisely
that denotative fallacy. Professional jargons are often both euphemistic and open about
their authoritarianism when looked at closely for the values in the language. The
California Department of Corrections had over 8,000 forms in its bureaucracy in the
mid-'70s, only one of whichthe San Quentin execution documentactually used the
word prisoner. That's one end of the scale. The other might be the subtext of the
personnel interviewer's closing line, "We will be happy to keep you in mind."
Both usages display one-sided power relationships and the social capacity of the language
user to manipulate and encode reality. In my work I try to choose sentences that unveil
these values. I'm also very interested in the way street language creates neologisms.
Ghetto slang represents a dispute over who gets to create meanings in the society. When
the counterculture of the '60s was decisively beaten, its elaborate anti-institutional
vocabulary very quickly appeared dated, even quaint. The advantage of the forms I've used
is that no types of language are ostensibly prohibited because the constraints of
character, plot, and setting do not apply

LM: At what point did the titles "Ketjak" and "Tjanting"
suggest themselves?

RS: In the case of Ketjak, I knew the musical form several years before
writing that book, and my interest in the form had a great deal of intensity at various
points. But the title did not immediately attach itself to the text. With Tjanting Iwas already working with the text when I came across the instrument tjanting, which is
a writing implement in batik, despite what it sounds like aurally. Roughly six weeks into
what would be the three years of writing that work, I came across this instrument; the
absolute minute I saw it and learned its name, I knew exactly what the title of my work
would be and was ecstatic an afternoon. I have problems with my titles, as all authors do,
because titles are remarkably ambiguous in terms of their relationships to the text as a
whole. I agree with Walter Benjamin's distinction between captions and
titlescaptions penetrate a text and highlight certain elements, while titles name
the whole. But the issue is very ambiguous. Think of the radically different
implications of using "He Do the Police in Different Voices" and "The Waste
Land" as the title of Eliot's poem.

SG: Could you discuss the minute-by-minute processes that occur when you're
creating a highly formalized work like Ketjak or Tjanting?

RS: The specifics differ substantially from piece to piece. At the moment, I'm
working on two sections of The Alphabet, for which I'm not only using different
procedures and notebooks, but even different pens. In the case of Tjanting, which
was not begun until after the conclusion of The Age of Huts, the initial impulse
centered on a few very simple ideas. In Ketjak, three years earlier, I had
developed a paragraph form that both repeated and expanded, giving me a great deal of
freedom and still allowing a strong sense of cohesiveness. I felt sure that the simple
doubling of sentences from paragraph to paragraph was not the limit of that idea, since,
in the most literary sense, it was nothing less than rhyme. I also had a desire to see if
I could come up with bipolar structure, something that would pull the poem back and forth,
a formal analogy for both struggle and dialectics. One possibility was to begin with two
parallel paragraphs, so that the first paragraph would be repeated and expanded in all
ensuing even-numbered ones. I was aware of the Fibonacci series, in which each item in the
sequence is the sum of the two previous numbers. I was also quite conscious of, and
attracted to, the fact that this system is the numerical pattern most often found in
nature. It also has the advantage of having the number one for the first two items in the
series: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, etc. Using each figure to determine the
number of sentences in a paragraph gave me the beginning parallel structure (1, 1) I was
seeking plus a progressional asymmetric form that would nonetheless be sensed as coherent
by a reader. Unlike Ketjak, where development from one occurrence of a sentence to
the next is minimal, I took a device from "2197," one of the works in The Age
of Huts, in which a recurring sentence is radically rewritten so as to appear
distorted, broken, artificial. In both works I sought a means of revealing how even the
clearest of sentences, the most "inevitable" of logics, was no less a
Frankensteinian construction. In "2197" this was accomplished by superimposing
the vocabulary of one sentence onto the syntax of another, while in Tjanting the
recurrent sentences devour themselves. For Tjanting I had a lined accounting
notebook in which I intended to put together the final "correct" copy, but I
felt that it was too large to carry around with me and write wherever I went, as has
always been my practice. I decided to use a tiny pocket journal that Lyn Hejinian had
given me for the initial collection of sentences, which were to be transferred, not in
their original order, to the larger book. Once I made these decisions, all of which
preceded the writing and which took ten months to figure out, I was able to begin.

SG: Do you find such highly formalized structure inhibiting? Or did it liberate you
by opening a predetermined "space" that you are free to fill?

RS: Once I had made those initial decisions, I ceased to be concerned with form
except insofar as it might exist at the level of syntax or prosody within the individual
sentences, so I hardly felt constricted. I am not a formalist. For twenty-one
months, the process of Tjanting consisted of writing individual sentences, as they
occurred to me or as I found them, in a series of pocket notebooks, at work, on the bus,
before breakfast, at political meetings or readings or concerts, whenever, and once every
couple of days or week I would sit down for a more extended period, up to five or six
hours, and integrate these sentences into the text, while rewriting or deconstructing the
recurrent sentences as they came up. Often when I was working in the larger journal new
material would be generated in response to everything I was working with. In fact, one of
the advantages of this method is that the writer is dealing with so many things
simultaneously that the opportunities to see and exploit possible connections, and to
develop the writing in any number of areas, are vast. But at any given moment, the process
is one of writing by pen in a notebook, looking very hard at an individual sentence or
phrase or word, examining what it might be saying, how it might be saying it, considering
its social implications, its place in the text, the prosody, what other sentences and
phrases might lead into it, even the physical shape and color of the individual letters,
or how the ink dries into the grain of the paper. For me, the pleasure of writing is
absolutely fixed within the localness of this context. I want the reader to share that
aspect of this experience, which is why the focus is so heavily placed on the individual
sentence. If the sentences don't "follow" or build abstractions, such as
character or plot, to carry the attention away from what is in front of the reader, there
is no place to go but into the present, the real.

SG: Despite the absence of narrative structures, the relationship between one
sentence and the next in your text is obviously not accidental. But the importance of this
relationship, even the nature of the relationship, seems to vary.

RS: Yes, and that's an important point. In Ketjak I was learning how to
separate sentences out for the first time, so there was very little sense of anaphoric
referral between one sentence and the next, minimal conscious plays from one to the next.
In Tjanting there is an awful lot of that kind of in-structuring going on. For
example, I might have one sentence referring to a sexual experience and the next will have
to do with turning on a pilot light. In determining what sentence to place where, these
sorts of relationships figured heavily. The whole procedure is very multilayered. I've
heard my writing described as based on chance techniques, but I don't work that way. It's
not that I want to disparage the ability of chance techniques as a method of disrupting
the habits of the ego on the text, but on the other hand this approach has a tendency, if
used over a long period of time, to lead to works without shape. And I'm extremely
interested in developing the sense of shape. It's not an accident that both Tjanting and
Ketjak begin with short paragraphs and end with long ones.

LM: Earlier you mentioned your lack of interest in character and plot. Your work
seems to question the basic assumptions on which these notions are based, but you seem to
be coming at this issue from a different perspective than metafictionists such as Coover,
Barth, and Federman.

RS: Yes, we share some assumptions, but I also see metafiction as being
ultimately a compromise in this regard. While it tries to solve many of the same problems
that today's poets are confronting, it still does so from the perspective of character and
narrative. This is why Kathy Acker's works are so radically different from metafiction as
such. Metafiction hardly ever addresses the question, "Is the character a
construct?" or "To what degree is a character a construct?" Even in
fragmenting things, metafictionists still have to rely on that final appeal back to the
level that is ultimately a compromise, ignoring, among other things, the fact that people
experience their lives discontinuously. This is something that, to my mind, forever
compromises the work of Samuel Becketthis sentences are wonderful, but his works are
not. To have a character at all is very seldom to critique the idea of "What is a
person?" If the words are my life, and if all of the meanings of the words and the
ways I receive them are social and derive from social sourcesfrom family, friends,
jobs, education, the welfare office, all those inputsexactly at what point do I get
to be the autonomous, continuous person who can be the guilty and unreliable narrator of
most fiction, including metafiction? Such individuals do not exist in life and,
accordingly, become a problematic basis for fiction.

SG: You mentioned Reich as proposing a kind of structural model for Ketjak. Are
any other artists working in this area?

RS: Several. Beyond the "pattern-music" composers, such as Phil Glass or
Terry Riley, is William Duckworth. "The Time Curved Preludes" is totally based
on the Fibonacci number series. A sculptor named Mario Merz also does works based on it.
There's even a newsletter of artists, mostly painters and musicians, published by the
Fibonacci Association of San Jose. Duckworth's use of these ideas, in particular, seems
close to what I am doing, in that he often uses the series to signify or generate
quantity.

LM: Several writers I know also use various forms of arbitrary structural
devicespeople like Abish, Federman, Steve Katz, Ron Sukenick. What sorts of things
cause you to be attracted to this approachand why did you choose the specific
approaches on which you rely?

RS: Iwas attracted to the Fibonacci series because it's one that occurs in
nature. The relationships within the curve of a mollusk shell and the placement of leaves
around a branch are both Fibonacci structures. These are forms that look extremely simple,
elegant, and almost accidental in their grace. The Fibonacci series proposes a
relationship to mathematics as pure abstraction and to the idea that nature and
mathematics are not separate. It also has the ability to generate spatial relationships,
quantitative relationships that are shapely and perceptible from one paragraph to the
next. I was looking recently at the number of prime numbers under 10,000; there are
1229itself a prime number, which is not an accident. Yet the relationship between
the prime numbers is such that there is very little difference between one prime number
and the next, particularly when you get up into the middle thousands. There is no way to
develop a good-looking work out of these prime-number relationships, no way I could create
a pleasing work out of that arbitrary structureand neither could Walter Abish or
Steve Katzwithout submitting it to some other kind of operation that would knock out
a lot of the prime numbers so that you could develop some sense of appropriate shape.
Without some other operation, a sense of scale is lost. And scale, at least in my work, is
essential in creating an impression of progress, movement, development. Scale motivates
the reader. A paragraph that has 9907 sentences and another that would have 9923 will not
be perceived as being smaller and larger. This is an important consideration, especially
when using non-narrative structures. I should admit that I almost flunked math in high
school, so I don't propose myself as a mathematician. I tend to appropriate things as I
need them.

LM: Obviously, in a fundamental sense, the structural conventions on which you
based Ketjak and Tjanting are no more artificial than the conventions of
realistic fiction. The shapes that emerge are different, and may serve different
functions, but they're all conventional.

RS: Right. In terms of arbitrariness, all works begin, end, and proceed in terms of
conventions. Of course, there's nothing wrong with conventions per se, whether or
not we're talking about those of the first-person novel, the organic forms of Charles
Olson or Wordworth's Prelude, or Whitman's free verse or purely closed forms. The
real question is whether the writer is proposing value or simply operating from the
thoughtlessness of lazy habit. If there is historical antecedent to the kinds of works
that I write, it would have to be something like the sonnet, a closed form on a much
smaller scale.

SG: Are there any other contemporary writers you especially admire or feel you have
something in common with?

RS: A lot. Charles Bernstein, Lyn Hejinian, Barrett Watten, Bob Perelman, Kit
Robinson, and Rae Armantrout immediately come to mind as people who for many years have
had something important to teach me. Others I might mention in this regard are Robert
Grenier, Bruce Andrews, Carla Harryman, Allen Bernheimer, and Kathy Acker. If there is one
book that made me feel as I was reading it that all the effort everybody had been exerting
for over a decade was totally worth it, Hejinian's My Life is that book. But there
are so many others. I've been editing an anthology of "my kind of writing,"
entitled In the American Tree, for Ross Erikson's New Wilderness Poetics Series.
That book will contain prose, poetry, and criticism of thirty-nine writers. It could
easily have been twice as many This is a fine time for writing in America. A
decentralized literature has a million important tasks. Everyone seems to be hard at
work.